Exploring Two Decades of Research in Community Resilience: A Content Analysis Across the International Literature

INTRODUCTION: Community resilience (CR) has gradually become a hot topic in uncertain times, especially in the last five years. The current study presents a systematic review based on content analysis to present a knowledge graph of CR research over the last 20 years. METHODS: We use an approach of Leximancer to conduct the content analysis to explore the intellectual foundations, research context, topics, and methods of CR literature based on 583 published studies. RESULTS: The results show that framework research of CR is a hot topic throughout the last 20 years. In the first stage (from 2001 to 2015), CR connected with the themes of “framework, disaster, change, and model”. Comparatively, in the second stage (from 2016 to 2020), the themes of “social capital, capacity, and framework” are more salient connecting with CR. Additionally, the study detected that the key issues varied across countries. Specifically, research in the US focused on the social support dynamic, while in Australia, recovery from the disaster was the predominant theme. Furthermore, in the UK, studies mostly explore resilience issues in the background related to flooding. DISCUSSION: Our findings provide a comprehensive picture of CR research covering the last 20 years and put forward thoughts and recommendations for future resilience studies considering 1) obstacles within daily life, 2) resilience set within organizational perspectives, and 3) cultural context.